Submitted
by
Nemo the Magnificent
on Sunday February 09, 2014 @05:20PM

Nemo the Magnificent writes: A few days ago we talked over a post by David Raphael accusing Verizon of slowing down Netflix, by way of throttling Amazon AWS. Now Jonathan Feldman gives us reason to believe that the carriers won't win the war on Netflix, because tools for monitoring the performance of carriers will emerge nd we'll catch them if they try. I just now exercised one such tool, NetNeutralityTest.com from Speedchedker Ltd. My carrier is Verizon (FiOS), and the test showed my download speed at the moment to be 12 Mbps. It was the same to Linode in NJ but only 3 Mbps to AWS East. Hmm.

Nemo the Magnificent writes: Ever been asked a question in a job interview that's just so abysmally stupid, you're tempted to give in to the snark and blow the whole thing up? Here are suggested interview-ending answers to 16 of the stupidest questions candidates actually got asked in interviews at tech companies in 2013, according to employment site Glassdoor. Oil to pour on the burning bridges.

The suit, filed this week in federal court in Washington, D.C., also names Roger Vinson, the judge who signed the Verizon order, as a defendant, along with Attorney General Eric Holder and NSA Director Keith Alexander. The plaintiffs say that the NSA’s surveillance program violates the Constitution and unfairly and unnecessarily infringes on citizens’ privacy. The classified order directs Verizon to hand over all of the so-called metadata for calls on its network to the NSA. The metadata includes the originating and terminating phone numbers along with details of the call, but not the contents of the call.

“The order, issued and signed by Judge Roger Vinson, violates the U.S. Constitution and also federal laws, including, but not limited to, the outrageous breach of privacy, freedom of speech, freedom of association, and the due process rights of American citizens.”

schwit1 writes: In its ruling, which lets Simon Glik continue his lawsuit, the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston said the wiretapping statute under which Glik was arrested and the seizure of his phone violated his First and Fourth Amendment rights.Link to Original Source

blackbearnh writes: We all know by now that Test Driven Development is a best practice. And so is having 100% of your code reviewed. And 70% unit test coverage. And keeping your CCN complexity numbers below 20. And doing pre-sprint grooming of stories. And a hundred other industry 'best practices' that in isolation seem like a great idea. But at the end of the day, how much time does it leave for developers to be innovative and creative?

A piece on O'Reilly Radar is arguing that excessive process in software development is sucking the life out of passionate developers, all in the name of making sure that 'good code' gets written. TFA:"The underlying feedback loop making this progressively worse is that passionate programmers write great code, but process kills passion. Disaffected programmers write poor code, and poor code makes management add more process in an attempt to 'make' their programmers write good code. That just makes morale worse, and so on."Link to Original Source

tsu doh nimh writes: Brian Krebs has posted a fascinating, inside look at a battle that's been brewing between two Russian men who run a pair of the largest online rogue pharmacy programs in the world. The story focuses more on Pavel Vrublevsky, the man alleged to run Rx-Promotion — a pharmacy program that specializes in selling addictive, controlled substances like Oxycodone — and how Russian drug authorities recently raided a party in Moscow thrown for Rx-Promotion affiliates who had been competing for cash and prizes and the grand prize — a one kilogram bar of gold.Link to Original Source

rsmiller510 writes: A new book that calls into question the power of the internet to affect real political change is quite prescient given the situation in Egypt today where the government has literally shut down the internet.Link to Original Source

rsmiller510 writes: You might not know what 'near field communication is,' but there's a chance it could transform the iPhone into a payment machine tied to your iTunes account. And if that happens, it could put Apple in the payments business.Link to Original Source

kdawson writes: A Bulgarian newspaper carries a report that missing security researcher Dancho Danchev has been found — and is in a mental institution (link is a Google translation of the Bulgarian original). The article claims that 'according to reliable source of [the newspaper] Dnevnik he was placed in a Bulgarian psychiatric hospital since December 11.' I hope more will eventually be revealed as to where Danchev spent the 3 months preceding that date. During the bygone Soviet era, 'psychiatric hospital' didn't have the same connotations it might in the West.Link to Original Source

It's a tale that has all the trappings of a cult 1960s sci-fi movie: Scientists bring back ancient salt crystals, dug up from deep below Death Valley for climate research. The sparkling crystals are carefully packed away until, years later, a young, unknown researcher takes a second look at the 34,000-year-old crystals and discovers, trapped inside, something strange. Something... alive.

An anonymous reader writes: Lawrenceville Plasma Physics (LPP) LLC has announced that they have indisputable evidence that they have achieved 1 billion degrees via plasma confinement . With another year of experimentation followed by three years of development, they could be ready to bring to market a 5 MW plant (size of the largest wind turbines) that only costs $300,000. Slashdot reported previously that LPP had achieved billion-degree results. But critics had said that the previous set-up could not rule out the possibility that this temperature was merely a function of the beam they were creating. The new results show definitively that "confinement" is indeed happening, and is the source of the temperature, which is a key attribute needed to develop a practical commercial reactor. The reults will be published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Fusion Energy describing the basic theory guiding LPP's pursuit of useful fusion energy from the dense plasma focus, as well as featuring these first experimental results from the team's Focus Fusion-1 experimental device in Middlesex, NJ.Link to Original Source